The Gospel of John

This year, instead of studying a chapter a day, I will go more slowly through the New Testament, carefully reading a paragraph or two each day.  I will begin with the gospel of John.  This study will take about four months, but should leave us with a strong understanding of the topics, big and small, that are covered in this famous gospel.

This "fourth gospel" is quite different from the other three, much more philosophical, putting the life of the Jewish Messiah in terms of a universal plan for all humankind.

The other three gospels, presumably elaborating on a common source, emphasize Jesus's ministry in Galilee.  They provide a sequence of short pithy statements of Jesus (in keeping with Jewish wisdom literature, such as the book of Proverbs) and describe miraculous works he does, often near Capernaum.  In contrast, John assumes we have read those books and elaborates on Jesus's ministry near Jerusalem and on his longer Messianic teachings.  As I read this gospel, I hear John thinking, "I don't think anyone has heard of the the time when..."

I am using a number of resources as I read through the Gospel of John.  One is the commentary by William Barclay. Another is the commentary by Merrill Tenney.

Merrill Tenney outlines the Gospel of John as follows:

• John 1: 1–1: 18, Prologue
• John 1: 19–John 4, Period of Consideration
• John 5–6, Period of Controversy
• John 7–11: 53, Period of Conflict
• John 11: 54–12: 36a, Period of Crisis
• John 12: 36b–17: 26, Period of Conference
• John 18–20, Period of Consummation

(Obviously Tenney enjoys poetically making everything "Period of C...".  He also seems to like seven divisions for this book.)

In the "Period of Consideration", Tenney sees Jesus presented at the beginning of his ministry to a number of different groups.  In chapter 1, John the Baptist claims witness to the Messiah and introduces the Messiah to his disciples.  In chapter 2 of John's gospel, Mary presents her son to family and disciples, after which Jesus makes a statement in Jerusalem about the future of Jewish worship by driving out the temple merchants.  A Jewish religious leader, Nicodemus, gets a private interview in chapter 3, followed again by witness from John the baptist.  After that, a non-Jew, a woman from the reviled Samaritans, also gets a private interview.

These presentations of the Messiah occur primarily in Judea and Jerusalem and apparently happened before the opening of Jesus's great Galilean ministry.  A. T. Robertson, in his classic harmony of the gospels, puts the opening of Jesus's Galilean ministry, recorded in Mark 1:4, Matthew 4:17 and Luke 4:15, after the visit with the woman of Sychar, which ends at John 4:45.

Beginning in John 4:46, Jesus is presented to the people of Galilee as he heals a nobleman's son in Cana, the site of the earlier wedding.  The nobleman is from the town of Capernaum, a place that Jesus will shortly set as his home.